Before college football enters the thick of conference play, there are a few weeks where teams get to see how they’ve come together without risking an untimely loss. These games have become known as “guarantee games.”
The big deal is that the opponent, a smaller university, is being paid to play these games.
In 2025, LSU will pay a total of $3.7 million to its three guarantee opponents. At the SEC preseason media day press conference, head coach Brian Kelly stated that paying in-state schools will be a commonality for LSU.
“If we’re going to have to pay somebody to come in and play us, why not play the in-state schools and take care of them?” Kelly said. “We have some great schools we’re going to play. Louisiana Tech and Southeastern Louisiana this year. Excited about those. So really about sharing with those that are in the state and balancing the schedule.”
Guarantee games have become an extremely common part of college football, but where and why did this start?
During the First World War, Georgia Tech’s head coach, John Heisman, lost to the Cumberland baseball team. Heisman was the head coach of baseball and football at the time.
Heisman declared war on Cumberland after a pitiful 22-0 loss in 1915 on the baseball diamond. He stacked his football team in the following fall. Cumberland disbanded its football team between the spring of 1915 and the fall of 1916, but failed to inform Georgia Tech.
If Cumberland was a no-show, it would owe the Yellow Jackets $3,000, so the athletic manager threw together 13 athletes to take the field. To help cover the cost, Heisman gave the team $500 to cover the bus fees to Atlanta.
In this game, Georgia Tech topped Cumberland 222-0 in the highest scoring game in NCAA football history.
Since then, this was practiced more often, but it didn’t become pay-to-play immediately. After the Cumberland and Georgia Tech game, other programs adopted the idea to simply cover the cost of opponents’ travel expenses.
In the early 1900s, teams like Notre Dame began paying opponents to play them, especially during the great depression, when smaller schools were struggling to sponsor sports.
Over 100 years later, guarantee games have evolved to the point where institutions are paid millions for one night of football taken off their schedules.
These games have come to be known as a chance to test the waters before conference play begins, but also as an opportunity to pull off an early upset. UL-Monroe’s win over Alabama in the early 2000s is a famous game, but it’s not as widely known that Alabama paid $1 million for that upset.
No matter how it started, guarantee games are here to stay. Teams from the Power Four conferences will likely always pay other universities to remove nonconference games from their schedules, and it all started with revenge during baseball season.
